Teaching our children to be safe

There's been a lot in the news over the last couple of weeks about missing teenager Daniel Morcombe and it serves as a scary reminder of the need to protect our kids.

Locally, you may have heard in the news that police are asking parents to have the "stranger danger" conversation with their children after reports of an attempted abduction of two boys in Port Macquarie on Monday.

But how exactly do you have that conversation in a way that helps the children to become alert but not alarmed?

Maggie Dent is a parenting author based on the North Coast. She said that Daniel's disappearance has shown us that we do need to be cautious but what happened to him was very rare "In fact, 92% of children who are harmed, are harmed by someone they know," she said.

She said that while we do need to talk with children before they're ten about safety, it is important not to scare children too much, or limit their childhood. "There are bad people in the world that we need to be careful of and there are also unsafe places," she said. "We need to let them know that some of the unsafe people might not be strangers."

She said that in towns, there are ways for children to run free, "I believe that children can still go and run amuck away from their parents even without a mobile phone," she said. "You'd need about five or six children to be safe."

One important point is to encourage, not dissuade a child's natural intuition about people and situations."If we encourage the intuition in children they are actually extremely good," she said. Some of the ways that we may invalidate a child's intuition are to tell them they're climbing too high when they feel quite safe, or to tell them they have to kiss or hug someone they don't feel comfortable being near. "I think we need to respect that," Maggie said.

She said that it's important to talk with children about what to do if they get lost in a shopping centre or somewhere else. "We actually have to coach our children if we get lost what happens, if someone approaches you in a car," she said. "There are people who can look incredible gorgeous and normal who can be unsafe."